Description:
Speculative Time examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, and on important aspects of visual representation.
Review Quotes: "Moving from the specificity of the 1929 stock market crash to larger concerns about time and history, Crosthwaite draws on an impressive range of fields such as queer theory, African American studies, and economic history. ...Deeply researched and beautifully written, Speculative Time offers fascinating close readings of canonical texts by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wright, and Lorca, as well as works by lesser-known authors such as Christina Stead and Rudolph Fisher, to map writers' imagination of financial crises." -- MLA Prize citation
"A review cannot fully convey the intellectual reach and empirical richness of Speculative Time.... Speculative Time is an outstanding book - brilliantly conceived, deeply researched, convincingly argued, and elegantly written. It will be of interest to scholars across the disciplines interested in speculation and finance capitalism, temporalities and futures, and American literary modernism; the history of the future and the sociology of expectations; and intellectual and cultural history more broadly. Speculative Time will also reward general readers who seek ways of imagining different futures during periods of crisis.... This book is an extraordinary account of the esthetic politics of value that shows how the language and logic of speculation reconfigured conceptions of time itself." -- Jamie Pietruska, Finance and Society"[T]he comprehensiveness, rigor, and attention to detail [are] remarkable.... Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis ...brilliantly expound[s] the role of a speculative conception of time in the run-up and aftermath of the Great Crash. It is a recommended reading, as well, for everyone who seeks to better understand the booms and busts that we have lived through in more recent decades and the attractive force that financial speculation continues to exert in the twenty-first century." -- A. Elisabeth Reichel, European Journal of American Studies"The innovative aspects of this study make it required reading for any serious engagement with American literature and economic theory.... Crosthwaite does what all astute literary and cultural critics do: by reaching into a past time and place, he guides his readers' eyes forward - not only to the present moment or recent past but also to the near future. I highly recommend this text to be placed on American literature and culture, or American studies, syllabi.... [M]odel[s] the kind of work that could, and should, be generated in the near future." -- Camille L. Stallings, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory"Impressively researched... Its interdisciplinary, historical framework is compelling, placing literary and economic texts in direct conversation... Speculative Time deftly moves across forms and techniques, persuasively reading novels, poetry, plays, art, photos, and even zoning maps alongside one another... [P]roffers a striking synthesis of history, culture, and thought... [M]akes a strong case for revisiting American modernist texts now and the book brims with original accounts of them." -- Angela S. Allan, American Literary History"Based on ... excellent literary-historical analysis, Speculative Time is an important work for any scholar interested in how economics and cultural production relate to one another in the modernist period." -- Benjamin Mangrum, Transatlantica"[A]n incredibly rich survey of the popular, financial, and literary discourses on financial speculation in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. [...] Crosthwaite is a brilliant tour guide. ... [I]ncredibly well researched ... . [A]n immensely suggestive excursion through the American literary scene of the period, one that opens up new perspectives on familiar texts as well as providing access to less familiar ones." -- Bruce Barnhart, Genre"Crosthwaite's premise is cogent and well-considered, and by paying particular attention to the effects of speculation well beyond the worlds of finance and accumulation, he helps us see differently.... Speculative Time is concerned with ... the interplay between form and content, in every instance; the book treats these topics deftly and conscientiously.... Crosthwaite's study is exceptionally broad-ranging, too .... Speculative Time offers a multifarious reconceptualization of the effects - in this period of nonstop upheaval - generated when a variety of figures both actual and fictional revised their central assumptions about time, risk, and storytelling and grappled with the unknown in ultimately mesmerizing ways." -- Gayle Rogers, Affirmations: Of the Modern"Speculative Time is valuable not only for its treatment of neglected authors alongside more established names, but also for its account of the complicated cultural politics of the 1930s and ways in which Marxist forms of social and economic theory ran up against the idiosyncrasies of American culture." -- Paul Giles, Studies in the Novel"With an impressive mastery of economic and intellectual history, Crosthwaite shows how American writers have both adopted and critiqued a speculative attitude towards the future, sensitive to risk and filled with premonitions of ruin. Speculative Time explains how literary forms we think we know about - including foreshadowing and temporally disordered narratives - reflect a society in which everyone must place their bets on an uncertain future." -- Andrew Lawson, Leeds Beckett University"More than just an account of modern finance and the literature it produced, Speculative Time sheds new light on an entire American crisis culture that made precarity the norm. From Wall Street panics to Marxist prognostication to racist urban planning, Crosthwaite shows how new temporalities of risk turned everyone into gamblers." -- Jason R. Puskar, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee"Crosthwaite's expansive study argues that fictions of speculation enable us to think differently and in nuanced ways about questions of temporality, futurity, and chronology. Beautifully written, persuasively argued, and impeccably historicised, the book is essential reading not only for economic critics but for anyone interested in American literature of the long twentieth century." -- Sinead Moynihan, University of Exeter